Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 260 - Once and for All - Scotus on Being.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Once and for All, a Scotus on Being. We began our tour through the world of 13th century philosophy by citing a classic philosophical remark, it depends upon what the meaning of the word is is. Those who recall the political debates of the 1990s will have no trouble identifying this as a quote from Bill Clinton. But historians of philosophy might rather think of a far earlier debate. Among medievals, there was a heated controversy over the meaning of is. Does being, in Latin esse, have only one meaning or many different meanings? Usually, we have no difficulty answering this sort of question. The word bill is obviously used with a number of different meanings. It could be the first name of a former president, the business end of a duck, or what the waiter hands you at the end of a business lunch. Aristotle explained at the beginning of his categories, a work on which philosophers from late antiquity through the middle ages cut their teeth, that words are used equivocally when they are applied with such different meanings. If a word is used on different occasions with the same meaning, I am using that word unifically. Thus, when I apply the word human to Bill Clinton and to Aristotle, I am using it as a unifical term. So why did the medieval's worry whether the word being is used equivocally or unifically? Most historians of philosophy will tell you that the problem first emerged in the late 13th century with Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent defending the equivocal theory of being and John Duns Scotus a unifical understanding. But that's because most historians of philosophy aren't regular listeners to this podcast. By contrast, you, my faithful audience, will know that a controversy over this issue had already emerged in the Islamic world. Muslim philosopher-theologians writing in Arabic anticipated the views we find in Christian philosopher-theologians writing in Latin, like Aquinas, Henry, and Scotus. Some of the clever philosophical moves that most historians take to be inventions of the Latin schoolmen were actually reinventions. Particularly striking are the parallels between the arguments given by the so-called subtle doctor, Duns Scotus, and the no less subtle Fakhradin Ahrazi, who lived about a century earlier. This is no coincidence. Scotus and Fakhradin were not reading one another, but they were provoked by the same source, Avicenna. His works were highly influential in Latin and totally dominant in 12th and 13th century Arabic philosophy. And it was Avicenna who first made a distinction that forms the background to both debates over the meaning of being. He contrasted the essence of a thing to that thing's existence. The idea is a pretty plausible one. On the one hand, you have the question of what something is by its very nature. On the other hand, the question of whether it exists. Actually, these two questions are already distinguished by Aristotle. What Avicenna added was the point that essences are almost always neutral with respect to existence. He gave the example of a triangle. You can study the nature or essence of a triangle and learn all sorts of things about it, for instance that its angles add up to 180 degrees. But nothing about the nature of triangle tells you whether it exists or not. So, if a triangle does exist, this must be because some other thing, like a child doing geometry homework, has come along and made it exist. The same point will apply to the child too, of course. She is a human, and if you think about what it means to be a human, you'll see that humanity guarantees many things, being alive, being rational, being an animal, but not just plain, being. So, for the child to exist, she too must be caused to exist. However, Avicenna added, there is one essence that is not like this, the essence of that which necessarily exists. And this necessary existent, of course, is God. He exists through himself by his very nature so that he cannot fail to exist, and exists without needing a cause. The essence-existence distinction was taken up eagerly by Muslim theologians, and the Christians independently followed suit. Already William of Auvergne made use of it in the first half of the 13th century, but the most famous example, as usual, is Aquinas. It forms the core idea of his early work On Being and Essence, in Latin De Ente et Essentia. Germans are always disappointed to learn that despite being called De Ente, it is not a treatise about ducks. The background in Avicenna is quite obvious. Aquinas cites him on the very first page for the idea that existence and essence are immediate concepts of the mind, not ideas we need to reach through some indirect process of reasoning. He also applies Avicenna's triangle test to demonstrate the difference between essence and existence. I can know what something is without knowing whether there is any such thing. For Aquinas, this shows that there is what the scholastics like to call a real distinction here. In other words, essence is distinct from existence, and not just in the way we think about it. The two are really distinct in things themselves. His follower, Giles of Rome, agreed, and in fact took the point even further than Aquinas probably wanted to go. Giles compared the combination of essence and existence to the relation between the matter and the form of a physical substance. Just as matter is a separate principle that receives form, so essences are distinct in themselves and then receive actual existence. The essence serves to put limits or boundaries on being, whereas in God, being remains infinite and unlimited. What does all this have to do with Bill Clinton's puzzle about the meaning of is? Well, let's consider again how Avicenna's distinction might apply to God. Well, in the divine case, the distinction actually breaks down. The reason God exists through his very essence is that God has no essence apart from his existence. Or, we might go so far as to say that he just is being or existence. This at least is how Avicenna saw things. But if this is so, then it looks like God has being of a very different sort than the being we find in, say, Bill Clinton. The existence that is God is not the same as the existence which was given to Bill Clinton when he was created. This forces us to say that there are at least two kinds of existence. On the one hand, we have divine existence which is necessary and identical to God's very essence. On the other hand, we have created existence which is contingent and distinct from the essence of the created thing. We can reach the same result without appealing to the unusual case of God. If, like any self-respecting scholastic, you have read your Aristotle, you know he says that being is said in many ways. Aristotle would seem to think that the being of a human is different from the being of a duck. An Aristotelian will also be tempted to think that the independent being of substances, like humans and ducks, is different from the dependent being of accidental properties, like the color of the duck's bill or Bill Clinton's determination to get a bill through Congress. On this basis, Aquinas was led to the conclusion that being is indeed used equivocally. It means one thing when applied to God, another when applied to creatures. On the other hand, he didn't think that this was a case of pure equivocation like the completely different senses of the word bill. Instead, language is applied to God and to creatures in different, yet related ways. Again, this is good Aristotle. He too had said that though being is said in many ways, it is one of those terms that is applied to one primary case and then some other secondary cases. A classic illustration is the term healthy. Its primary use is when we apply it to a healthy person, but we can also say that food or medicine is healthy because it contributes to the health of the person. Here we are dealing with a particular kind of equivocal use, which is called analogy. Aquinas uses the theory of analogy to explain how various perfections are ascribed to God. Just as healthy is said primarily of the healthy person, so good is applied primarily to God, who is the cause of good and is perfect goodness itself. The same analysis can be given in the case of being. God is not just any old existing thing, but the source of existence for all other things. He is, in fact, being itself. Aquinas's approach has various advantages. Most obviously, it splits the difference between making God too transcendent and not transcendent enough. We don't want all the words we use for created things to be applied to God in a purely equivocal way. If that were the case, these words would have utterly different meanings from the ones they have when used normally, and these meanings would have to remain mysterious, given that we can reach knowledge of God only on the basis of created things. If, on the other hand, we applied terms to God unifically, then we would be putting Him on a par with created things. Another bonus is that Aquinas avoids violating divine simplicity. If God is truly simple, then His various traits, like goodness and mercy, cannot be really distinct from one another, and this could only be the case if we are using the words goodness and mercy rather differently in His case. After all, I can call a created thing good without meaning that that thing is merciful. If I rejoice, oh man, this almond croissant is good, this has nothing to do with mercy, even if I did say merci to the nice French baker who sold it to me. The identity between God's essence and His existence is another aspect of God's simplicity, and a way in which He differs even from other immaterial things, like souls and angels whose essence is distinct from their existence. Though the analogy theory and the essence-existence distinction make a good pairing, they don't have to come together. In the generation of Scotus, a theologian named Godfrey of Fontaines accepted that we apply language to God analogically, yet he launched a powerful attack against the essence-existence distinction targeting its formulation by Aquinas and especially Giles of Rome. While Godfrey accepts that we can think about things in terms of their essences, or as existing things, he denies that this is a real distinction in the things themselves. Instead, it is a distinction of the sort we saw when looking at speculative grammar. If I think or speak of a duck's essence or a duck as existing, I am just using two different modes of signifying the same thing. This no more implies a real difference in ducks than it would if I used the adjective beautiful, when saying ducks are beautiful, and then the noun beauty, in saying ducks have a beauty rare even among waterfowl. Besides, the real version of the distinction runs afoul of obvious difficulties. If, as Giles of Rome claimed, essence is something distinct that receives existence the way that matter receives form, then essence would already have to exist before it receives existence the way that matter may already exist before taking on form. This is clearly absurd. But what about Avicenna's triangle argument, that we can understand what something is without knowing whether it exists? To this, Godfrey replies, we can only know things when they do in fact exist. We never grasp mysterious ontologically neutral essences, but real things. We're almost ready now to look at Scotus's solution, but not quite. While Aquinas, Giles, and Godfrey are an important part of the background, there is another author to whom Scotus replies most directly, and this is Henry of Ghent. Henry's position on these matters is similar to that of Aquinas, but with a few twists. Henry too thinks that being is applied to God and to creatures by way of analogy. This is connected to the way we come to know God. As we saw in our episode on Henry, he is inspired by Avicenna's proposal that being is a primary concept of the mind. For Henry, this means that all of us have a kind of indistinct awareness or intuition of God who, as the doctrine of analogy would suggest, is nothing other than pure being. Henry also accepts the distinction between essence and existence. But, as Godfrey pointed out in his objections to the real version of the distinction, the two only ever come together. Henry admits that there is no such thing as essence without existence, so that the difference between them is weaker than that between two really distinct objects like say Bill and Hillary Clinton, who, it is safe to say, have had their differences. Yet neither are essence and existence fully identical. They are, says Henry, intentionally distinct. This is a step in the direction of Scotus's notion of a formal distinction, a kind of middle ground between a real distinction and a distinction that is merely the product of our minds. Indeed, Scotus himself apparently wanted to understand the difference between essence and existence using his idea of a formal distinction. Actually, he doesn't say much about this. Our recent interview guest Richard Cross has written that, When he does mention it, though, he seems to see it as a formal distinction, like the difference between the persons of the Trinity. Just as Avicenna said, it is no part of what it means to be a duck that the duck must exist, so we can distinguish between the essence of a duck and its existence. But, as Henry said, that doesn't mean that there are duck essences that don't exist. To the contrary, any real essence is always found together with existence. So, even though we can grasp these two aspects of the duck as being different, they are always found together, and are thus only formally, not really, distinct. Something to which Scotus has definitely given sustained attention, and which is very much at the heart of his metaphysical thinking, is the univocity of being. Characteristically, Scotus uses several clever arguments to support his position. One, by his standard relatively straightforward argument, is the following. Scotus agrees with Aquinas that natural knowledge of God must be built on our experience of the created world. So, to grasp that God is a being, we need to extend a concept of being that we got from created things and apply it to God. Hence, it must be the same concept, and the term being needs to be used with the same meaning. Another somewhat more complicated rationale goes like this. We can apply the notion of being to God without realizing that God is infinite, necessary, purely actual, or whatever else makes God's being so different. Plenty of people admit that God exists without understanding that He exists necessarily or is infinite. So, clearly we begin by applying the normal notion of being to Him, and then add infinity, necessity, and so on. It is these added features that make God so special. It's not by virtue of just existing or being that He transcends created things. And speaking of transcending, Scotus's claim that being is unifical has a lot to do with a theme we've discussed in previous episodes, the transcendentals. Just by way of reminder, the transcendentals are features that belong to all things, both divine and worldly. These include unity, goodness, truth, and of course, being. Scotus takes this very seriously, and assumes that these features do indeed transcend all divisions within reality. Everything is a being, and then it's a further question what kind of being. When we divide being into types, we're actually applying another more complicated transcendental feature. Not everything is finite, nor is everything infinite, but everything is either finite or infinite. The same point goes for necessity and contingency. Everything that exists, exists either necessarily in itself, or only contingent upon some cause. These pairs of properties divide being, with God on one side and creation on the other. With this, by the way, Scotus is rejecting Henry's idea that we are obscurely grasping God when we form our immediate idea of being. For Scotus, being is unifical, so our general idea of being applies to everything that is, and is no more appropriate to God than to anything else that exists. Thus, if you want to grasp God it isn't enough to grasp being. You have to be more specific about what kind of being you have in mind. If you take your idea of being and add a feature, like infinity or necessity, then you're getting somewhere, since God and only God is an infinite being, and only He necessarily exists. We say that Aquinas's analogy theory has several advantages, but the same is true of Scotus's univocity theory. One has to do with the nature of the enterprise we're engaged in here, namely metaphysics. Scotus borrows another idea from Avicenna here, saying that metaphysics is the study of being in general. But every science needs a single object of study. Experts in waterfowl study creatures all of whom are equally, and in the same sense, waterfowl. In the same way, if metaphysics is a properly unified science, the metaphysician needs to be able to study being wherever it turns up, in God or in creatures, in substances or in accidents, and needs to mean the same thing by being in each case. General contrary properties like necessary and contingent, or infinite and finite, will also fall under this science of metaphysics. This is because jointly, each pair covers everything that has being, and metaphysics is the general study of all beings. The fact that Scotus has borrowed so much from Avicenna does not of course detract from Scotus's importance as a thinker. For one thing, he stole from the best. For another, he develops Avicenna's ideas considerably. He puts them at the service of a unifical theory of being that was new in Latin Christendom, even if it had, unbeknownst to Scotus, already been defended in Central Asia by Fakhradin Arazi. But there is a different problem lurking here. In the Islamic world, Avicenna's strong association between God and necessity had attracted a good deal of criticism. Most were prepared to agree with Avicenna that God must exist through himself because he is the necessary existent. But few were prepared to admit that God is necessary in every respect. Doesn't God enjoy the same sort of freedom we do, or rather a far greater degree of freedom? But then, how is divine freedom compatible with his necessary existence? Reflection on this issue leads Scotus to a radical philosophical breakthrough as he develops a theory of contingency so innovative and influential that it might be called the first modern theory of free will. To find out how he did it, duck out of school or work, and enjoy some free time while listening to the next episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.